The clicks of death strike again. I feel for you. I lost 6 gigabytes of archived material including over 100 pages of original work. Stuff that can never be duplicated or recreated. Not a photo, not a scan but totally original art. Gone. Felt like someone reached in and tore my heart out.

Did you lose anything that you can't find again? Those manuals can be re-scanned. Photos can be taken again. Once original art is gone, it's gone. I heard the clicks of death and if I had backed everything up at the first sign of trouble I'd still have those archives as opposed to some scraps of finished images I was able to retrieve off the internet.

No doubt, manuals can be rescanned, Pics are gone cause once I take them and transfer the files, I delete original from camera SD. the other data is gone as well, cause I'm not going back to every place I got [auto-censored] from just to retrieve it.The real YANK MY CRANK point is I let a DELL IT NUT JOB talk me into whipping my hard drive and starting over, WHICH EVEN with my non-IT background Brain THE BELLS WERE BONGING in my head WARNING DOES NOT COMPUTE. Sometimes I wish MY COLT Talked LONG DISTANCE

Believe it or not wiping a drive does not delete all the data and a dead drive can still be coerced to give up it's data. If you got the coin. My brother went thru this several times in the past 5 years. I've got 4 of his dead laptops in my computer crap closet. Now he backs his pics and stuff up on the cloud. He learned the hard way. I back my stuff up on CDs/Blurays. $30 bucks for 50 25gig blurays. Cheap piece of mind. And I got tired of clients bringing me their hardware saying fix it please... 1000's of photos lost.... memories.... dead pets.... Don't care anymore. Didn't I provide you with blank disks (or tapes back in the day) to back up your data? Didn't I provide you with the software when I set up your system/network? Didn't I provide you with several days of instruction on data protection, backup and recovery? And you still didn't listen? Your fault, not mine, here's a number of someone to recover your data.... don't forget your checkbook. I got so fed up with it I no longer work IT in any way, shape or form. Hate to work on my own machines now.

Believe it or not wiping a drive does not delete all the data and a dead drive can still be coerced to give up it's data. If you got the coin. My brother went thru this several times in the past 5 years. I've got 4 of his dead laptops in my computer crap closet. Now he backs his pics and stuff up on the cloud. He learned the hard way. I back my stuff up on CDs/Blurays. $30 bucks for 50 25gig blurays. Cheap piece of mind. And I got tired of clients bringing me their hardware saying fix it please... 1000's of photos lost.... memories.... dead pets.... Don't care anymore. Didn't I provide you with blank disks (or tapes back in the day) to back up your data? Didn't I provide you with the software when I set up your system/network? Didn't I provide you with several days of instruction on data protection, backup and recovery? And you still didn't listen? Your fault, not mine, here's a number of someone to recover your data.... don't forget your checkbook. I got so fed up with it I no longer work IT in any way, shape or form. Hate to work on my own machines now.

Oh I concur on the "Didn't I tell you to do a Back-up" WHich I didn'tAnd another gripe with the current IT world. Laptop less than a yr old. Did it come with any Disc or software Disc. HELL F K N NOAnd I couldn't get any, when I asked.

I never delete the photos from my camera until I have two backups on removable drives...

For the rest of the documents I copy them to these drives from time to time.

In any case it helps also to make a second partition on your hard drive to store all data. It will do nothing in case of physical failure, but if you have to start the operating system from scratch and even format the system partition, the data will still be there.

I've been saying it all along-- technology and the Internet that Al Gore invented is a farce... Then again, I don't download, don't twitter, don't Facebook, don't scan, barely email and can't even work my TV remote very well....But I revel in being a Luddite cause' I don't have these modern problems the rest of you seem to have either. I keep my photos in a box, my references on a shelf, and as a result I keep what remains of my sanity. When the power goes out in the apocalypse, I can still happily build models by candlelight! VR, Russ

Russ;I don't have these modern problems the rest of you seem to have either. I keep my photos in a box, my references on a shelf, and as a result I keep what remains of my sanity. When the power goes out in the apocalypse, I can still happily build models by candlelight! VR, Russ

Call us Prehistoric but the old ways always seem to work out the better. My tried and true photo negatives are always in my box, and as long as they stay dry and temp controlled they will be there for the calling. LOL

Redundancy my fellow redundancy...... Invest in an external hard drive and store your important (to you) stuff on it so that when the inevitable happens you have a backup system of files (I have 3... backups to the backups to the backups)

External hard drives are failure prone because people believe because they are seperate from the computer that you can handle them while they are spinning or they are tougher but in reality they are often the same harddisk as in your pc just mounted in case with a usb interface and power supply. Last winter I bought a 4tb external drive, ripped it apart and mounted it in my pc. Why? Because it was the EXACT model as the bare drive, just $50 cheaper. They also get dropped, exposed to liquids, kids and the environment and age, if they sit for a long time they can fail. I only use externals to transfer data. I've got a box of destroyed externals from people wanting me to fix them. There are really only two ways to store data long term, and before the cloud only one. Physical removable media. I'm sure my 3.5, 5.25 and 8 inch disks are still readable if I only had a pc capable of running the hardware without massive amounts of backdating or finding a motherboard that still has IDE and ISA slots. Goto Newegg, get a bluray or dvd burner, I'm sure you can find a USB one, a spindle of blanks, less than 70 bucks total. There is great little program that I use that is totally free, burns everything from cds to blurays across several different brand of burners. And people say home burned optical media doesn't have good shelf life, but that is total b.s. I have cds I burned in the early 90's when the tech first came out that will read today. I store them in dark closet, in cases to prevent scratches. This is the ONLY way to securely back up your data save the cloud. I've got years of training and decades of experience and I had to find simple, reliable ways to backup data for people who were technically declined. My mother learned how to back up her data, my brother knows how to also but in his case he's just stubborn so he uses the cloud now.

I've lost more flash drives and scratched more disks than I have damaged external hard drives. I back up all of my important files, on an external drive every few months. I've been doing this for five years, switched systems, switched computers and still have all of my files.

I've lost more flash drives and scratched more disks than I have damaged external hard drives. I back up all of my important files, on an external drive every few months. I've been doing this for five years, switched systems, switched computers and still have all of my files.

Nice idea, have you tried the SS drives?

I always build with two drives so I can back up to F drive as it is called in my system.

There's hard drive recovery software available that might be able to recover your data even though you wiped it. And it's not very expensive. I wish I could remember the name, but I used one to recover the hard drive on my old laptop when it crashed hard.

In the belief that the issue is the operating system the data should all be safe and recoverable. I lost a PC lately and I just had the old drive with a different OS put in the new PC and I access the data freely.

Unless the drive has been low level formatted, which overwrites the entire drive with 1's and 0's, data can still be recovered. Not all because as soon as a sector is marked as unused by the OS it will start writing data there such as temp internet files, cache files, data. There is freeware out there that will do a decent job of recovering files. If you do toss a hard drive you need to physically destroy the drive to keep people from accessing your data. One of the simplest ways is with a big hammer making sure you destroy the platters. Electronic salvage companies will drill holes thru the drive and platters in several places making it impossible to have your old data hijacked.

Back in the late 80's, on a business trip, I gave advice to a client that said you don't become a computer expert until you have deleted your 3 most important files. Invest in an external drive and put all of your data on it using a backup program or just copy the files. Apps, manuals, etc., can be reinstalled. Pick a period (weekly, daily, monthly, depending on the rate of data generation) and copy the files over to the external drive. It ain't fast, but it's better than losing your data!

This is the precise reason why being a Luddite like me has its advantages-- my books and paper have never disappeared on a whim. I have to make a conscious effort to throw them out, and if the power fails, I can still model by candlelight! My sympathies to you young folk who live in a digital world!! VR, Russ